Collins – children collaborating

When you get a broad mix of children in early years settings it has advantage. So you need – children become each other’s teachers. And so you need that broad experience, you need many types of children and the most comprehensive intake you can have for most of the children to thrive well and particularly actually for the children who come from more disadvantaged communities to do well.    

So consistently at all ages, in almost all the evidence reviews I can think of, collaboration is, an increasingly amount of collaboration between children, has impact and effect. So children learn a great deal from each other and they learn a great deal by co-constructing together and building new understandings and insights together as well as from each other. It’s not only of course an opportunity to learn but it also provides great opportunities for understanding more about what it means to be a human being in our society. You’re learning about being and what it means to be a member of a community. 

I spent a lot of time teaching in early years and in primary schools in London, in East London, where when I taught nearly 35 years ago now when I started teaching, we had incredibly mixed communities. And I would argue that the cohesion and the tolerance and the acceptance of being and living together starts by helping children learn together. That’s a foundation to building long term sustainable communities. So it’s not only about learning, it’s about society, it’s about personal identity, it’s about recognizing that we live in communities and I think it’s a – of course it’s a natural act for people to be social. So there’s huge value in collaboration and in building collaboration.  

And I think the other angle is I’m increasingly interested in the fact that outside of school and outside of early education, children spend less time just negotiating the world together as children. So, through all sorts of sometimes myths parents are less willing to let their children just go and play and to be together at all ages. And there’s been a huge almost like commodification of childhood where it’s all now you have to go and – you have to go to something that’s organized and paid for. You have to go to some theme park or some event or some hole or building that’s been specially designed.  

So that the children missing out on what you might call the third space in life where you just are with each other without adults and you’re negotiating. So a lot of the learning that happened then – negotiation, waiting to take your turn, taking control of your own immediate gratification, alliance building – all those things now increasingly fall back into the learning environment of schools. So we have to modify slightly what we do to make sure that children get enough time together to develop those skills. Because they’re not skills that are linked only to improved outcomes – they are and that’s interesting. These are the skills later on in life that determine who thrives and who doesn’t in the workplace, who sustains relationships, who has lives that are full of friendship and love and not solitude and loneliness. These are fundamental things. So you can’t have enough collaboration and you have to plan for it and you have to encourage and build it. I think it’s a core purpose of education.